Briefs makes iOS app design easy and stress-free

Marco Tabini |
May 29, 2013

Forget paper, static graphics, or ad-hoc solutions —with Briefs, prototyping iOS apps is as simple as building a slideshow, and as close to the real thing as you can come without calling in a developer.

The $200 price tag makes Briefs one of the most expensive products you are likely to find on the App Store, and there is no denying that the editor has plenty of room for improvement, both in terms of functionality and stability. The app crashed a couple times while I was working on it (though no data was lost in the process), and some areas of the user interface are a little obscure; for example, it took me a while to figure out how actors work, and not having access to a hierarchical structure of a scene's assets makes it hard, on occasion, to navigate through its contents.

Bottom line Professional apps are often expensive, and Briefs is as useful as many other hundred-dollar apps that you are likely to find on the hard drive of someone who builds apps for a living. Besides, designers and developers often charge in the hundreds of dollars per hour, and I know of no person who fits in either category and likes to waste time only so that they can charge clients more or argue with each other about pixel dimensions and animation timings.

In short, Briefs allows everyone involved with a development project to focus on their respective strengths, replacing typical mockup approaches based on static images or technologies like Flash and HTML. It provides an interactive environment that closely matches the real thing, and is worth every penny.